As a video company one of the first questions we get asked is – how much does a video cost?

And you guessed it, it’s not a simple answer.

It’s a bit like asking how much does a car cost? You can pay anything from £1k-100k and everything in between. So lets run with the car analogy for bit. The first question you might ask is “How am I going to use the car?”

Is it a small car for the school run or do you need to pull a caravan with it?

Are you going to drive 30k miles next year on your commute or just go to the shops twice a week?

And finally, do I want everyone to look at me and think ‘hey, cool car…that person must be important and successful”?

I’m being a tad flippant, but we all do that a little bit and actually it’s probably more important that we’d like to admit. With video the principles are similar. We need to establish the utility and function of the video and also the brand value that it brings to the business.

Return on Investment

Return on Investment (ROI) can be a tricky topic with any creative assets, particularly if you’re producing brand content.

How your customers feel about you and how they perceive and relate to your business is not tangible.

We can look at metrics like view counts and engagement but even this doesn’t tell us how many sales were made from the actual video.

In fact sometimes this data can be misleading. A video might only have a hundred views but generate thousands in revenue, another video might have thousands of views and generate no sales at all.

With brand video content the investment value is often not about revenue but about authority and market positioning. Hey, cool car.

Budgets for this type of investment are usually done as a percentage of the whole marketing budget for that year. If that budget falls below the £1000-2000 mark its probably best to think of other types of marketing to for the time being, well made video takes time to do properly and poorly made video can actually damage your brand.

With online adverts the process is more trackable, and combined with a well functioning ad campaign you will be able to track specific results all the way through to the sales page.

In this situation you need to figure out your production costs, your ad campaign costs and your expected sales revenue and do the maths to make sure it works out.

Remember that a good ad can be used over and over again. So whilst you might not break even on your first campaign, successive campaign will have covered initial costs and deliver better profits.

Another way to get a good return on investment from your video content is to repurpose it. The advantage of video is that it’s a rich media format. You can take stills, clips and audio from it and use them in lots of different ways. We’ve written an article about a number of ways that you can do that called 5 Ways to Repurpose Your Content

Getting Started

Once you have a ballpark budget then that’s a great place to start a conversation about costs.

A good video company can suggest ways of delivering to your set budget or give you comparative prices for more complex briefs. 

It’s important to keep the conversation open at this stage because there are a number of factors that affect budget and whilst some might seem important, they might not be necessary in the success of your video.

For example, if you’ve requested six interviews in four different locations but your budget is stretched, a good video company will suggest alternatives to align with your budget, like being able to tell the story across two locations instead. 

Finalising the Details

The budget for any project should be fixed based on the initial agreement, or at least detail any flexible costs. The only time the budget should shift from the initial agreement is if the scope of the work is changed.

Most importantly throughout any project the video company should have a dedicated project manager to communicate regularly with the client and let them know that their project is on schedule and on budget.

If you’d like to receive our pricing guide which has example projects and the budgets that were required to produce them, then pop your details inot the box below and we’ll send it straight out to you.